Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Battle size analysis properly done

I made an analysis of BL, Mordus Angels and Pasta ISK ratio against CFC, based on killboard data. I wasn't happy with the methodology, but I figured that it will be OK. I realized that it's not, when I saw this solo kill. Yes, you see it right, a frig blapped by a dread. One killer only. However this is anything but a solo kill. This happened in the 150B value dread battle, so it shouldn't be booked as a solo kill. So I redid the analysis. I used the May and June CFC loss data and a separate MoA/BL/Pasta loss data.

In this analysis, if two kills happened in the same system within 10 minutes (that's 1 min under TiDi), they belonged to the same battle and every kill was booked under the size of the battle. So every kill in the Battle of Daras were booked under 802, the highest number of killers on one kill of that battle. Of course the kills are de-whored, so if a 100M CFC ship died and MoA got 10% damage, it contributed to 10M MoA kill.

At first, let's see the activities of these alliances, measured in kills+losses:

As you can see, MoA and Pasta have nearly identical fleet size distribution (in absolute terms, MoA is 1.5x more active than Pasta). BL on the other hand is a large-fleet alliance. Very different playstyle. Whenever MoA or Pasta are joining a fleet, they are playing the game of BL, not their own. This is very visible on the ISK ratio graph:

Pasta has 80%+ ISK ratio in small fleets, MoA has 60+%. In large fleets on the other hand they both have much worse results and BL gets better than them, though BL is also better in small fleets.

So the old conclusion stays: if you want to fight CFC, you should do it in small gangs. If CFC forms up hard, just run away or dock up! If you engage their blob, or allow a small gang fight to escalate, you'll lose. Yes, running isn't fun. And blapping their blob is very much fun. Hunting ratters and small-gangs isn't that much fun. But it beats them, while banging your head to the wall with 33% ISK ratio is very much not. You need small gang FCs and gatecamps, blackops drops and inty roams, not following Elo Knight into his latest welp.

Finally: Goons avoid losses by using cheap doctrines, so it's impossible to hurt them by destroying their fleets. Let me illustrate this with two events from yesterday: a Pasta-BL-MoA fleet in 1DH-SX, between 0:20 and 0:40 slain a CFC Rupture fleet. 75 ships were destroyed, so at least 100 pilots took part in the battle that cost 2B to the evil and 0.4B to the champions. A few hours later 3 MoA and 1 Mortus pilots caught a PvE Tengu + pod belonging to a minion of evil. The "battle" report: 1.7B kill, 0.0 lost.

PS: I can't dedicate my blog to refute the lies of the head of evil, so just a quick PS. In his recent misinformation, he blames supercapital blobs for "crappy alliances" can't get Sov. The truth is that these "crappy alliances" don't want to get Sov, since it's nothing but a sub-par farming field. They are also very fine killing the "unbeatable" block members in small gangs. Again: in June, 75% of the CFC losses had 10 or less killers on them. Your clearly don't need a supercap blob to massacre CFC.

The lack of new "players" in the Sov space is not because of lack of ability but lack of will. Tell me, why would anyone want Sov, when you can earn more ISK in highsec and more kills from NPC space? The purpose of his article is "nerf supers", obviously not because he cares about the little guys, but because he can't keep up the supercap arms race with N3 but he clearly have superiority on the bombless bombers front.

21 comments:

Anonymous
said...

while banging your head to the wall with 33% ISK ratio

Goblin - do you still honestly think ISK ratio matters?As long as the ISK ratio is not 0, you can win and take the field. Winning eve is not about winning the finance simulator. It's about domination, controlling the best space and assets and trolling your enemies hard. Killboard stats are useful for one thing - watch you concoct your silly little analysis which make no sense at all yet you think provide insight.

How do we measure "massacring"? ISK ratio.ISK ratio alone means nothing, since it doesn't reflect how rich each side is. If a noob with only 100m came and attacked you and did 500m worth of damage to you and lost his 100m ship, he has a 500% isk ratio. But who would be hurt more, the noob who lost everything he owned, or you losing 500m?

since start of eve there were pirates existing. why should they do now make a difference? why should cfc suffer now from pirates? they existed since beginning and didnt had any effect. why should this be different now? because you pay them now some srp?

why should cfc stop logging in, if their cheap rupture fleet got massacred several times? or any other SRP backed up fleet?They can thro away these amounts easily. The members even gain ISK doing so.Controlling sov makes you rich. Your allience can pay the SRP and your pvp grunts will love it.Believe me, they also love to get blown up...they call it indeed fun...

what can MOA+BL+pasta change about that? You would need to cut the income of the alliance to make a change.If SRP can´t be provided in good rates, the members will think twice joining a fleet to get blown up.

till now, you are just showing that pirates are there and all is like it was before and no changes.

also if they get more recruits, till a point there are full. they cant expand. they are limited. also what shall they do, more little fleets? becoming bigger seems to be not very effective according to your statistics.

and which effect marmite and pasta/moa have?I dont see the cfc decreasing in numbers, or reducing the SRP because lacking money. they are stronger then ever. something must be wrong?

For now all of this exists in the void, you have "proven" that ganging up on a single, ill-prepared target with a small, hard to catch fleet is effective. It has been since day one and will always be.

What you don't provide is the result of this action. Does any of this have a good, solid impact on CFC's ability to field a blob and fight? Does it make impact on income from sov?

Sov is not worthless - you get secure stations. You get moons, jump bridges, cynogens, cynojammers, fuel reduction for POSes. Sure, those don't provide direct money to "farm", but they are an immense help when it comes to logistics and ease of life.

Your pilots gain sustainable, passive income and don't need to rat to fund their PvP.

@CFC grunt: Sov is indeed not worthless. Its value is perfectly known: the price of renting. Since we know it's around 3-4B/system and there are 20 renters/system on average, an average pilot gains around 200M/month. It's not nothing, but neither something unmatchable.

The impact is hard to measure because it always existed. What I recognized isn't new, it's newly discovered. Now we have the option to use it. Two month ago everyone believed that most CFC losses were caused by N3. Now we know it's around 15% and 5x more caused by pirates. So the option that N3 throws 100B/month on random CFC killing pirates is on the table now. Also, their recruitment power grew a lot: from "NPC trash losers", they changed to "the deadliest hunters of New Eden". That means lot of new pirates.

@daniel: I don't think many decision makers would follow a 1 month old newbie blogger. Not even the 2 and a half years old self of him doesn't.

My take on the point I think Gevlon is trying to get across is that even the lowly pirate can make a difference. Losses matter no matter where they come from. They all hurt the bottom line. ISK ratio matters because the more efficient your kills are the better you are able to sustain your offensive.

Losing a hundred ships from a dozen pirate attacks hurts just as much as losing them in a single pitched battle. It just doesn't create the same headlines. I think Gevlon is trying to create those headlines for the pirates and other non bloc groups. And trying to show in an objective way that thier efforts have an impact.

*cough*that certain post i am referring to isn't thaaat old. on a second thought i feel that the "claim" was in the comments, and i am sure it was a response to something that michael le blanc wrote/commented.sorry, i really don't feel like crawling through your blog for this.one other of the measures was the ally tournamant, which you told us were impossible to win for you, as you are lacking the muscle memorization skill and fast reaction time, which was one of the reasons why you left wow end-game - the latter statement was a comment directed towards me.

hell, do you even read what you are writing?

psyour post from your very first months in eve ... they are a very different thing, don't worry, i won't refer to them.

ppsblah blah, eve's a sandbox, yada yada, everybody can play as he wants, and so on, oh, and if anybody want's to go for sov cause he likes to do so, why not let him do so?!btw, being a pirate isn't a matter of wanting sov or not, but a chosen playstyle.

On a side note:either the link of this "solo kill" has changed or I am too dumb to klick on this link.It shows me only the firetail loss and gives a related kill of the Naglfar. The Naglfar kill shows 167 Parties involved...

Gevlon, CFC has lots of members, so the entity Cfc makes a huge target. Hitting a few of them should and will be easy, but it won't change CFC as an entity.I firmly believe that hitting their renters hard and keeping neuts logged in their ratting systems, in order to shut off their ratting activities will make enough renters leave this space as they won't be able to rat and as a result won't be able or willing to pay their due fees.Once CFC renter space has a bad reputation, like, "... it's not worth renting there, the systems are clogged with neuts and if u dare to undock, a small anti-ratter fleet will gank u soon enough..." then it will affect CFC...Although it will not make them either leave Nulsec or give up their renter space...

Have you considered the possibility that the more skilled players simply prefer working in small groups? That would mean that the less skilled players currently joining the large groups would not necessarily do any better if they formed smaller groups.

Lets see if I can get trough.As a low 'grunt' a cfc alliance in Delve, by your reckoning sov gains me nothing and the small gangs make me not log in due to losing non-srp ships.

My income is small, I'll admit due to this horrible RL interference and me considering EVE a game to play when I have nothing better to do.

Still, my inefficient PI (possible due to sov and stations and the like) nets me +/- 800 M/month.I spend 15 mins a day, over breakfast on setting it up.I've never ever had to abort a run or lost any PI materials due to the small gangs. So that means that unless I lose 800M worth of ships on a monthly basis I gain ISK.

I rat when I have to correct tests and/or am waiting on an op, Again I care not for major ISK efficiency so I use a 200M worth AFKtar. This nets me another 800M a month or so.

I have all doctrine ships I need and a number of fun pvp ships. In the last 6 months I've lost a single (old) rattlesnake worth about 800M to pasta, and nothing else. So ISK wise I care nothing for them, as I have all the money I will need for my personal playstyle and I keep getting more.

As for entertainment, I'd be far more unhappy if pasta/moa were to leave as then there would be nothing to fight from time to time when I want to PVP. Sure, I might lose ships, but meh.

Oh, and before you start subtracting PLEX costs. I have a job, I just pay for eve by subscription.

@Anonymous: most small gangs don't get fights from other small gangs, especially as CFC is infamously bad in small gangs. The small gang either ganks some ratters/miners or gets blobbed

@Next anon: indeed

@Daniel: 2 months ago everyone believed that most losses of CFC is coming from N3/PL and pirates are just nuisance. If anyone had told that MoA kills more CFC than PL, he'd be laughed off EVE. I'd agree that he is an idiot. Now, with hard numerical proof, it's completely different. Now I know that joining N3 or PL would be waste of time (as joining TEST was), therefore having Sov would be a mistake.

@Samus: No doubt that small gangs need less F1 pushers than a 1000 Megathrons. But they still can use a few. Also, they will start learning small gang if they are flying it.

@anonymous serving the Evil: because there are too few pirates. MoA+Pasta are about 3K, CFC are 10-15x more. Of course they can't cause trillions of damage. But now, with spotlight and support, more and more pirates will spawn. The days of the evil are counting down!

I dont think you understand the fact that many people in the CFC actually enjoy solo and small gang pvp. The average CFC member will participate in a handful of stratop and alliance fleets (huge blobs) per week. The rest of the time (that is, a majority of the time) theyre in small gangs with just a few corp and squad members roaming or camping. And who are they going to fight? NPC null of course since its the easiest, closest and most convient content. Therefore, obviously, NPC null is going to cause the majority of their loses.

Like a previous anon, I make enough from PI and afk ratting where I can afford up to 1-2 billion losses per month without it affecting me. I mostly fly cruisers and smaller, so I could afford to lose ships every day without it affecting my wallet, although I rarely take more than 200-300 million losses in a month. Anything lost in a stratop fleet doesnt counts since i actually make isk if I get blown up.

Since I have ships for every alliance doctrine that will get reinbursed if I lose them that means that I dont actually *need* income at all to participate in alliance level wars so all my income is spent on this thing you dont seem to grasp: "fun". I can buy a Sacrilege, bling it out, fly down to Syndicate and have fun for a couple weeks fighting small gangs of NPC null dwellers until it gets blown up and I ship another one from Jita. Unless Im flying a shiny ship in an alliance fleet that gets welped (a rare ocurrence), NPC null is going to be causing most of my losses while the majority of my kills will come from alliance fleets (since in a single large alliance battle I can get on more killmails than a whole week of small gang skirmishes).

NPC null dwellers could be a problem for the CFC if they had the means to actually challenge and take sov (a massive supercapital fleet). Other sov holding entities know that if they attack the CFC the CFC can also attack their space, which they stand to lose. The only thing NPC null has to fear is being camped in their stations, something that no alliance is willing to do literally all the time. But as long as they dont have the means to take sov, theyre nothing but much needed content. More pirates mean more content and that would be great even if it increases my losses because that would mean im getting more fights more often instead of having to roam for hours through empty systems.

"Since we know it's around 3-4B/system and there are 20 renters/system on average, an average pilot gains around 200M/month. It's not nothing, but neither something unmatchable."Renters don't pay 100% of what they can gain from their space to the landlord, that would be lunacy, so assuming rental cost is the income per system is pretty insane.

And you realise that's not ALL of the income from sov is in renting right? Better ratting, better PI, cheaper logistics, supercap production, moon mining, cheaper POS running costs. All of these give sov a leg up over non-sov. Add that all onto rental income and you get just the basic income levels.

The reason those pirates succeed lies in their small numbers. They're just big enough to do occasional raids and take out a ratter or two, but still small enough to avoid a retaliation.

If they grow in size too much, they'll either be absorbed into a powerbloc or get decimated as they try to stand up to a blob. It has already happened once in the past.

Pirate raids, on their own, will not end the CFC. If they became more and more frequent and organized, to the point of actually threatening assets on multiple fronts while simultaneously backed by a full-blown assault from the N3 - then we're talking about an actual threat.

For now, barring edge cases often linked here, most members actually survive without losing much to pirates.

BL purposeful keep the Alliance size to around 1k of dudes.We regularly cull inactives and all Corps within BL have their own identity and often fly corp doctrines ships or whatever the Alliance FC calls for when a fun fleet goes up.Sorry for killing the myth of Elo Legion.

I get more enjoyment from skirmish and harassment fleets and I do not care about sov and all that goes with holding Sovereignty. What I do care about are fights and a laugh on comms which is plentifully.

I make isk by missioning and WH stuff @ 1bil a month and as I tend not to replace my ships that much sit on @ 5bil liquid with all the required doctrine shiptypes in various staying and deployments (saves carrier space). The status quo will not change in the foreseeable future. Noone really cares about the current arms race for supers/titans as long as we have enough caps to kill a said target fast enough that's good enough for us sovless poors.